This is an actual email I got last week, and it almost made me choke on my breakfast. This was obviously an auto email with horrid customization:

• Gregg would be my last name, but nice try
• Um, we provide an extension to enhance productivity, not a physical product...cool guy
• And geeze, holy buzzword bingo!

We all want to work faster these days. More efficient. Reach more people, get more sales. Heck, I think my heart is starting to beat faster just writing about better, more efficient outreach! (Ok, I may need to get out more) That's where sales automation comes in; the problem is, most firms are doing it wrong.

What the heck is “Sales Automation”

The words “sales automation” get thrown around a lot. The problem is, I’m pretty sure the only term in the English language that is less specific is “good art”. The basic concept is simple, take activities that a sales team does (and sometimes part of a marketing team, but that’s a whole other field) and… automate them. I know, super complex and insightful; that’s what they pay me for.

Putting aside all the fancy marketing speak and hype, sales automation comes down to three things:

• Templates for email and chats and other forms of communication. These templates will often be dynamic allowing you to include customer information automatically in them or other dynamic content like a follow-up date.
• Scheduling software to time the sending of these messages and make sure a sequence is followed. This can be a simple schedule or something more complex that includes rules based on the behavior of the customer or other customer properties like the size of their business.
• A layer of Customer Data to help connect everything together. Standard information you might want includes contact information like the customer name and information about their company or opportunity size.

That’s it: templates, scheduling and data! Those are the three basic ingredients of sales automation. Now let’s look at what we do with them.

Bringing it Together: Outreach sequences

Those three basic ingredients above come together in what’s known as an “outreach sequence”. An outreach sequence is just taking the methods that an inside sales person would traditionally use and setting them up in a systematic, structured method. Think about what inside sales people might traditionally do:

• Email
• Call
• Text
• Send a carrier pigeon

In the “old days”, each rep would make up what they thought was the right way to do things. Maybe one rep sent an email, made a call and moved on. Another rep might make three emails and two calls, but do it over the space of a year. And who the heck knew what they were saying!

Then we moved on to potentially having each team maybe standardize on some language for emails, maybe have some phone scripts. Have a rule saying “reach out within 24 hours” or something like that. Well, outreach sequences are the next step in that evolution. Research shows that it takes 5-8 “touches” to get a meeting/sale, which is why a proper outreach sequence can be so critical to success. An outreach sequence might look something like this:

• Day 1: Call and email
• Day 2: Text
• Day 3: Call. If no answer → no message
• Day 5: Email; Text
• Day 9: Call. If no answer → leave message;
• Day 11: Text and email
• Day 13: Call. If no answer → no message; email
• Day 14: Call. If no answer → leave message; email; queue up the pigeon

For each day’s email/call/text, you can define what kind of messaging is associated with it. You may also define triggers to automatically kick off an outreach sequence (for example, when a user signs up for a demo of your product).

Now, you could do this very same thing without any automation, but it would take a LOT of time and effort to manage, especially if you had hundreds of these prospects in your pipeline. That’s where the automation tools come in.

Automation Tools: Two Approaches

Now that we’ve learned what sales automation is, let’s talk more about how to actually do it. There are two basic approaches you can take: "One Tool to Rule Them All" or "The Best in Breed".

#1: One Tool to Rule Them All

On one end of the spectrum you have highly structured tools like Outreach.io and SalesLoft and of course full-blown CRM’s like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. There are many, many others, but these are four of the most well known. These handle everything you need to do sales automation and are intended for larger startups through huge organizations, are massively powerful but also require a non-trivial effort for set up and care and feeding.

For the highly structured tools like these, the automation allows you to define the sequences, and from there as leads enter the pipeline, they can be routed through it. So the sales person doesn’t have to remember who to call today, or where they are in the sequence. After all, a day one call is a lot different from a day nine call!

The systems send out the appropriate emails and texts with the appropriate messaging at the appropriate time. That messaging can be based on data known about the customer – like their name or industry – so it’s personalized to the extent possible to the person’s persona. It really is an amazing thing to see!

#2: The Best in Breed

On the other end of the spectrum, you have individual tools that can handle different parts of the sales automation process. At the most basic level, a Google Spreadsheet can be a great way for a solo entrepreneur to keep track of their outbound contacts. And Gmail’s scheduled send and canned responses can be an adequate (if not particular elegant) way to manage some basic templates and schedule our emails. Still, a Google Spreadsheet wouldn’t be the right tool to run a 500 person sales team off of.

A big step up would be to use something like our product Text Blaze for templates and Followup for scheduling. These would provide a lot more ability to manage your outreach sequences (especially as part of a team) while still allowing you to mix and match your favorite tools.

Choosing the best tool for each job can be a great decision for several reasons. If you don't want to jump all in on a single solution, you can experiment with mixture of the right tools for you and your team. Or, if you have a great tool you are already using that meets one aspect of sales automation, you may not want to give it up to standardize on a single primary tool. In this case, it's best to augment your existing tools and workflows with others to fill in any missing gaps.

Dedicated tools can also offer more polish and feature depth than jack-of-all-trades. For example, do you think Salesforce's built-in email sending capability will ever offer the magical autocompletion of your sentences as you type that Gmail provides? I think not.

Or take our own product Text Blaze. It works great for creating simple templates and snippets, but also has incredible depth to create dynamic templates that embed your business logic and processes. What's more, it works in all the web apps you are already using whether that is Gmail, Outlook, Google Docs, Salesforce, Intercom, and more...

The following is quick example of a dynamic template that provides form fields and you can fill out and dynamically responds to them:

If you are interested in more of these examples, check out our blog post Top 8 Cold Email Templates for Crushing Outbound.

Comparison of Popular Tools

We've compiled a list of tools and scored them on the core aspects of sales automation. This list isn't exhaustive but it gives you a good idea of what's available.

* Text Blaze is our company's tool, so we may be biased, but as far as templates go there isn't anything out there better than it.

Here at Text Blaze, we took the mix and match approach to sales automation. We use Text Blaze for our templates, Gmail (via its API) to schedule and send our emails, and we use Google’s Bigquery database to power our decision engine and provide the data to customize our templates. This allows us to tailor our outreach exactly to our business needs and make sure we are using the best tool for each aspect of the job.

If you are able to and you believe in the centralizing on one main tool, something like Outreach, Salesloft or Salesforce could be the perfect fit. But if you use multiple tools (like Gmail for your email and something else for your customer data) you may want to go with a mixed-tool strategy for your sales automation selecting a best-in-breed tool for each functionality. That’s what we do and works great for us, but you should find the right combination for you and your team.

Calling your Shot

As we have seen, “sales automation” isn’t a single, monolithic thing. It’s a multifaceted idea with many different things to take into account to figure out what is appropriate for you and your organization.

Here are the final key questions you should ask yourself when choosing a sales automation approach:

How large is your sales team?

If it is hundreds or thousands you definitely don’t want everyone working off a spreadsheet. Furthermore, the return on investment customizing something like Salesforce or even developing your own custom tools with a corporate engineering team may make a lot of sense.

If it’s only a couple or a couple dozen though, scrappier tools like spreadsheets could make a lot of sense. However, if you can adopt Salesforce or a tool like Outreach without a lot of customization that may also be a great choice.

How developed is your sales process?

If you have a stack of polished playbooks and techniques you know work and work great, then investing a lot in automating and optimizing the execution of those makes a lot of sense.

If on the other hand, you are just starting out or changes to your business means you keep needing to rework those playbooks, then maybe scrappier more targeted approaches you can get up and running quickly and that let you adjust easier would make a lot of sense.

What’s your tools strategy?

Do you believe in a single system that runs all your sales operations (and do you have the technical support to maintain one)? If so adopting a tool like Salesforce and programming all your business logic into it may be the exact right fit for you.

On the other hand, do you prefer to use the best tool for each job (or do you already use a number of different tools in your work)? If so, you’ll want to automate your operation not by going all in on a single tool. For instance, we have many users who use Text Blaze alongside Salesforce, Hubspot or Zendesk giving them a best-in-breed template experience wherever they work.

Want to turbo charge your work with templates and snippets? Text Blaze is the fastest way to do that.

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